There's an NVIDIA Interview on PC PowerPlay Magazine titled "The Sky Isn’t Falling," as it hears from NVIDIA's Tony Tamasi about graphics cards, who tells them: "It’s no longer possible for a console to be a better or more capable graphics platform than the PC." Surprisingly, he says one of the reasons for this is that the console giants don't have the cash to compete in this area:

By the time of the Xbox 360 and PS3, the consoles were on par with the PC. If you look inside those boxes, they’re both powered by graphics technology by AMD or NVIDIA, because by that time all the graphics innovation was being done by PC graphics companies. NVIDIA spends 1.5 billion US dollars per year on research and development in graphics, every year, and in the course of a console’s lifecycle we’ll spend over 10 billion dollars into graphics research. Sony and Microsoft simply can’t afford to spend that kind of money. They just don’t have the investment capacity to match the PC guys; we can do it thanks to economy of scale, as we sell hundreds of millions of chips, year after year.

Microsoft doesn't have the funds to match? What a load of BS! It's more like they have to be cost conscience with the consumer. Most people aren't going to drop a grand on a console, so they can only do so much. For me, things are reaching a point of good enough graphically.

Microsoft doesn't have the funds to match? What a load of BS! It's more like they have to be cost conscience with the consumer.

He's right though. Microsoft and Sony commit themselves to fixed-spec platforms to keep costs down, relying on the fact that several years down the road the consoles will cost very little to make. Neither company could afford to keep up with PC gaming, as they wouldn't be profitable. It's why they use software prices to subsidise the cost of consoles.

Sony invested heavily in the PS3 and has struggled to make a profit, while PC gaming long ago eclipsed it.

So what? I don't understand the comparisons between consoles and PCs when it comes to gaming. They're two separate beasts that coexist just fine. The fact that between the big three, over 250 million consoles were sold last gen with countless games should be all the proof anyone needs to say that a large amount of people don't care if PC graphics can always be better. We all know that. It's like saying smoking will kill you. It's a different experience than PC gaming, and many people prefer it.

Nvidia can spend 100 billion in 10 years, it doesn't mean people are going to jump ship to PC gaming - that's not why they choose consoles over PCs for gaming.

Lets not forget that NO nVidia GPU made it inside XBOne or PS4... Jealous much?

And they (MS, Sony) could have included a faster GPU, but at what cost? Everybody remember how well the PS3 sold at a "low price" of $599...

Still, game devs don't seem to be able to push the hardware to render 1080p and that's a shame. Were not talking about multi-monitor or 4K like you would expect on a PC but just plain 1080p/60fps HDTV. Welcome to 2013, I would have expected XBOne and PS4 to be able to do that with ease.

Microsoft hasn't been, until recently, into the hardware part of things, and especially into graphic drivers. Why should MS spend that kind of money on something they don't make? Things might be different in the future, now.

The bigger point raised in the interview is that consoles can no longer keep up with PC gaming because they don't match the investment being made.

Tamasi: It’s no longer possible for a console to be a better or more capable graphics platform than the PC. I’ll tell you why. In the past, certainly with the first PlayStation and PS2, in that era there weren’t really good graphics on the PC. Around the time of the PS2 is when 3D really started coming to the PC, but before that time 3D was the domain of Silicon Graphics and other 3D workstations. Sony, Sega or Nintendo could invest in bringing 3D graphics to a consumer platform. In fact, the PS2 was faster than a PC.

The other issue is power, as consoles have to work with much less power than PCs.

The second factor is that everything is limited by power these days. If you want to go faster, you need a more efficient design or a bigger power supply. The laws of physics dictate that the amount of performance you’re going to get from graphics is a function of the efficiency of the architecture, and how much power budget you’re willing to give it. The most efficient architectures are from NVIDIA and AMD, and you’re not going to get anything that is significantly more power efficient in a console, as it’s using the same core technology. Yet the consoles have power budgets of only 200 or 300 Watts, so they can put them in the living room, using small fans for cooling, yet run quietly and cool. And that’s always going to be less capable than a PC, where we spend 250W just on the GPU. There’s no way a 200W Xbox is going to be beat a 1000W PC.

The bigger point raised in the interview is that consoles can no longer keep up with PC gaming because they don't match the investment being made.

The other issue is power, as consoles have to work with much less power than PCs.

It's a really interesting interview.

Yes, but they still aren't getting at why hundreds of millions of people choose consoles over PCs, which isn't because of graphics or power. They did mention it however, though in a different context...

so they can put them in the living room

Probably one of the biggest factors. Again, Nvidia can spend all they want on graphics chips, it's not going to move people from consoles to PCs because that's not why people choose consoles so I'll say again that they're wasting their time comparing the two.

Probably one of the biggest factors. Again, Nvidia can spend all they want on graphics chips, it's not going to move people from consoles to PCs because that's not why people choose consoles so I'll say again that they're wasting their time comparing the two.

Yes, but Valve is looking to change that with SteamOS and SteamBox. Hopefully they will be able to break the hold that Microsoft and Sony have on gaming and create an open, flexible platform that offers cheaper games and better graphics. Mobile phones and tablets have been evolving at breakneck speed because they're flexible platforms - there is more innovation and more competition. It doesn't make sense to have consoles with eight-to-ten year lifecycles.